Monday, October 14, 2013

The Philadelphia
City Center Book Club, which meets once a month, gathered on Oct 7, 2013 at
Marie Stuart’s place to hold a session of poetry. Joe and KumKum Cleetus were
guests; here they are, dressed for the occasion as the Raja and Rani of Kapurthala:

The session began
with Rachel Munafo’s wide-ranging discourse on poetry concerning World War I,
Homer’s Iliad, and the art of Cy
Twombly exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Wilfred Owen, John McCrae,
and Patrick Shaw-Stewart were the poets discussed by her.

KumKum Rachel, Caroline, & Marie

Nancy Naftulin gave a
wonderful exposition of Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem, La colombe poignardée et le jet
d'eau. It is a remarkable expression of the
wounds of war that comes out through a ‘shaped poem’, he called a Calligramme.

Marie, Martha, Nancy, & Taylor

Joe exploited
Vikram Seth’s novel, A Suitable Boy,
for its embedded poetry that traces the course of love with one of Lata Mehra’s
suitors, Amit, a poet manqué.

Marie, Karen, Martha, Nancy, & Taylor

KumKum read a famous poem of W.B. Yeats (When You are Old) and followed it with two of his unpublished poems that came to light recently through a gift of
his son to the National Library of Ireland.

Martha reads as Karen listens

Martha Witte introduced Marianne Moore’s
poetry and provided the text of a poem, Peter, but did not read it, unfortunately.
William Carlos Williams admired her poetry but Mary McCarthy, the novelist, was just as impressed by her bloomers,
it comes out.

Marie reads Heaney's poems as Caroline and Karen listen

The session concluded with Marie Stuart
reading with great feeling from the early and late poems of Seamus Heaney
who died on Aug 30, 2013, aged 74 years. Here are the readers gathered at the end of
the session: